need a bit of help with htaccess issues

[lorax]

I've got a client that I built an X-Cart shopping cart for. The whole thing resides under the sub-dir "/shop/" (web path)

When we went live I used the following in htaccess to ensure anyone coming in at the root would be sent to the sub-dir but we've been noticing some weird behavior and now I'm thinking I missed something or should have executed this differently.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} thewebsite\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}!/shop
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}!^/(manager/.*Śmanager)$
RewriteRule (.*) /shop/$1 [L]

[lorax]

Still not having much luck with sorting this out. Very odd behaviour. How best to systematically troubleshoot (or eliminate the htaccess file) without taking the site offline for more than a few minutes?

[jdMorgan]

Without more info on *what* weird results you see, all I can offer is a few troubleshooting tips. Well... only one, mainly. It is sometimes useful to *temporarily* change internal rewrites to external redirects, so that you can see what's happening in the browser address bar. Of course, this only works for pages, not included files and images -- you still have to 'view image link' or use Mozilla's 'Page Info' Tool to see how those are being rewritten.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} example\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/shop
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(manager/.*Śmanager)$
RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/shop/$1 [R=301,L]

Jim

[lorax]

thanks jdmorgan. I think I've resolved this issue - crosses fingers... ;)